Nicholas was the best you would be able to do for years to come"and I saw you were going to make it a crucial test of your ability.That is,forgive me,nothing but nonsense.
Whatever the article may be,you may write one infinitely superior to it next week or month.Just in proportion as you feel more deeply,or notice more keenly,and as you acquire the faculty of expressing your feelings or observations more delicately and powerfully which faculty must come into practice.It is not inspiration--it never was that--without practice,with any writer from Shakespeare down.
me.I don't say,like Papa,stop writing.God forbid.I would almost as soon say stop breathing,for it is pretty much the same thing.But only to remember that you have not yet conquered your art.You are a journeyman not a master workman,so if you don't succeed,it does not count.The future is what I look to,for you.I had to stop my work to say all this,so good-bye dear old chum.
Yours,MOTHER.
If anything worried Richard at all at this period,I think it was his desire to get down to steady newspaper work,or indeed any kind of work that would act as the first step of his career and by which he could pay his own way in the world.It was with this idea uppermost in his mind in the late spring of 1886,and without any particular regret for the ending of his college career,that he left Baltimore and,returning to his home in Philadelphia,determined to accept the first posit-->>